Tech Policy Podcast

The Tech Policy Podcast is produced by TechFreedom, a nonpartisan nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C., and hosted by Corbin Barthold, who tends to put his own position on the table early. Its ground is the meeting point of technology and constitutional law. A run of titles maps it: '433: AI and the First Amendment', '430: Social Media on Trial', '434: The Free Speech Recession' and '395: The Digital Fourth Amendment — With Orin Kerr'. Free expression ties most of it together. Barthold calls himself at least somewhat skeptical of most proposed AI regulation, and he saves his sharpest objections for efforts to regulate AI as speech. With TechFreedom colleagues Andy Young and Santana Bolton, talk turns to Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants and how futile it is to suppress a new technology, with Pets.com as a reminder that a bust did not stop the internet. Judicial opinions get a close reading. One episode revisits Justice Amy Coney Barrett's concurrence in Moody v. NetChoice, which questioned whether the First Amendment has anything to say when an algorithm or AI does too much of the editorial work, and its title, '431: Barrett’s Moody Concurrence: Oddly Popular, Wholly Wrong', leaves no doubt about the verdict. The rebuttal is concrete: optimizing a feed one way may push it toward outrage, optimizing for return visits chases satisfaction, and either way people are choosing what to measure and how. Courtrooms get the same scrutiny. Barthold, who admits to no great love for plaintiff's lawyers, takes up a bellwether trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court over whether Instagram and YouTube cause teen addiction or mental health problems. A guest there argues that the big tobacco analogy breaks down, since tobacco is simply a product while social media sits in the realm of speech. Dissent gets a seat as well. A panel recorded live at State of the Net, an annual event in D.C., includes Joel Thayer of the Digital Progress Institute, introduced as bringing an alternative perspective, along with a former host of the show. When intermediate scrutiny comes up, someone pauses to explain it for the non-lawyers, setting it against the strict scrutiny that applies to a direct attack on content. The international picture gets a hearing too. Two guests from The Future of Free Speech, which is also the title of their book, discuss a global free speech recession and an elite crisis of confidence in liberal values. One of them calls it magical thinking to expect EU bureaucrats and a new balancing test to set things right, and rejects the idea of one free speech theory to rule them all. Privacy completes the range. Orin Kerr returns to discuss The Digital Fourth Amendment, a book arguing that the Constitution should impose the same limits in the digital realm as in the physical one. Case names like Miami Herald v. Tornillo and Turner come up freely, yet the conversation stays loose and often dry, as when Barthold teases Kerr about leaving Berkeley Law for Stanford Law.